Making a Timeless User Experience: Providing good user experience takes more than drawing handsome icons for people who don’t read. One has to think in all directions to properly define smart user-centric design, then, apply those decisions in a timeless fashion.
Kmart Tests A Revamped Logo: Kmart Corp. is testing a revamped logo, replacing its trademark red and blue sign with gray and lime green in an updated style. The interior changes in prototype stores include brighter lighting, wider aisles and a different floor plan. (There is no mention of the green alien glow eminating from the store.)
Dutch Designs for Cities Built on Ideas and What-If’s: “Datatown” is the architects’ idea of a possible megacity of the future where 250 million inhabitants occupy a self-contained city four times the size of the Netherlands with the density of Hong Kong.
One of the firm’s most controversial proposals is Pig City. Ham is big business in the Netherlands and there are now as many pigs as people (about 15 million). MVRDV imagines that with no restraints pork production could ultimately occupy as much as 80 percent of the country. So the architects came up with the idea of building pig skyscrapers along the coast. The 40-story towers would include pigpens with balconies providing sunlight, ceilings rigged with self-serve straw bales, slaughterhouses and hydroponic feed farms.
Beauty is Only Screen Deep: Ultimately, looks don’t matter. I have seen enough people delighted by horrendously designed pages — just thrilled as they squint to read pink type on a red background — because the site has something they want. And I have seen users utterly frustrated by attractive sites that use elaborate drop-down menus and rollover buttons to “enhance” the user experience.
The fact is that most people do not use the web for visual stimulation. People use the web to buy things, find information, make contacts, and what they notice is whether they can successfully buy things, find information, and make contacts. They do not notice the well-thought-out tag line or the expensive logo — they’re just window dressing, just frosting on the cake. In fact, all the fussing we designers do to draw attention to our work often winds up just getting in the way.
Selling newspapers in a Jimmy Eat World: A while back, Dave Barry wrote a column complaining that many young people do not read newspapers, and seem to be more interested in Britney Spears than the Middle East, so a group of 8th graders decided to call him on it, as well as offer advice on how the newspaper industry might attract young readers. Some favorites:
”Make the newspaper more humorous, it is soooo boring. Talk about skateboarding, it is so huge now you don’t even know.”
”Talk about not boring stuff. Like the peace thing. It’s very important, I understand that. But it’s boring.”
”When you talk about this stuff make it interesting. Like when we kill a terrorist, don’t just say he died, say he blew up in a million pieces or something like that.”
Life after e-culture: It is time to leave behind an outdated model of communication that favours the production of one-way messages over genuine interaction and participation. Thanks to the “sender-to-receiver” model that dominates today’s communication, the world is awash in print, and ads, and packaging, and email spam, that nobody, except the client, asked for. A technology-driven “point-to-mass” mentality dominates product development, too — which is why brand intrusion, semiotic pollution, and pointless products, despoil our perceptual and physical landscape.
Our business models in design also have to change. The idea of a self-contained design project — of “signing off”, when a design is finished — make no sense in a world whose systems don’t stop changing. Think of your own website: it needs attention constantly, like a child, or a garden. Today’s project-based business model in design is like a water company that delivers a bucket of water to your door and pronounces its mission accomplished. We need to evolve new business models for design — that enable design to operate as a continuous service, not as manufacturing process.
Digital Art With Je Ne Sais Quoi: To raise awareness of digital art in France — and grease the wheels for funding — Arvers organized the six-day digital art festival Villette Numerique, which debuts in Paris. The biennial event features art installations, an audio art jury competition, concerts, club shows, cinema and video game “rooms.” Judging by this surreal, organic game called “Society”, I think they’re on to something.
How to fail in e-business with a record effort: It’s easy to fail in e-business; what’s hard is failing magnificently. The Big Five music recording companies have been transcendent in this respect. Their combined efforts have gone beyond killing their e-businesses and are close to destroying an entire industry. The following are 10 rules of e-business failure, a list inspired by the recording industry’s imaginative approach.
Behind the Wired News Design: Unveiled Oct. 10, 2002, the site revives classic look-and-feel features with modern functionality, built to conform to Web standards. Wired News is now easier to use, quicker to access and much more streamlined for producers to update and modify.
The brains and primary driving force behind this compelling new design is Douglas Bowman, Network Design Manager for Terra Lycos, who shed a lot of light on what goes into a standards-based redesign in this interview.